A pelican appears in the movie "Finding Nemo", and on the screen is this image:
This picture shows the pelican's biggest feature to the fullest: the pelican's biggest feature is that it has an oversized mouth, which looks like Doraemon's four-dimensional pocket, as if it can put down anything.
The pelican's mouth is 1/3 the length of the body, and it has a huge throat sac that can be freely expanded, because the mouth is too large, so the pelican looks clumsy when it walks, as if it is difficult to control its balance. This bird looks mighty and domineering, and is widely found on the coast and near the banks of inland lakes and rivers.
If you go to the local zoo, you'll see this huge bird at the waterfowl pavilion or the zoo's waterfowl lake. More often, it is still only found in photo and video materials. In people's minds, pelicans rely on their large mouths to fish on the surface of the water and make nests at the water's edge or in trees to lay their eggs. When the pelican spreads its wings, the wingspan of more than 3 meters makes people wonder the magic of the Creator.
But don't be fooled by his brave appearance: this bird's beak is not only large, but also very indebted. Like crows, the mouths that belong to birds are small.
Today, Xiaobian will take you to understand the most real pelicans.
The full text totals 3100 words, reading time 7 minutes, by "chestnut and shortbread" is a bird original debut, reprint please indicate the source.
Pelecanus, which we usually refer to, is a general reference to the 8 species of pelicans in the pelican genus of the pelican family, which are different according to habitat and appearance characteristics, which are:
Australian pelicans (pelecanus conspicillatus)
Pelecanus philippensis
Pink-backed pelican (pelecanus rufescens)
Peruvian pelicans (pelecanus thagus)
Pelecanus occidentalis
Pelecanus crispus
Pelecanus erythrorhynchos
Pelecanus onocrotalus
Our country is not the main habitat of pelicans, and there are currently 3 species of pelicans, namely: the white pelican (which may be the great white pelican in the zoo), the spot-billed pelican and the curly-winged pelican. In Xinjiang's Beitashan and Fujian's Luoyuan Bay, pelican-infested locations are. Especially in Lo Yuen Bay, dozens of precious curly-winged pelicans come to overwinter every year. On March 17, 2017, more than 40 curly-winged pelicans overwintered in the waters of Longyuan Bay, the highest number in years.
In previous years, the curly-feathered pelican was active in the open sea area and could only be observed with the help of telescopes. This year was particularly special, with a large number of curly-feathered pelicans beginning to move near the shore, and a large number of bird lovers this time completely fulfilled their desire to photograph pelicans up close.
What if you live in a city where there are no pelicans nearby? Then you can go to your local zoo to see pelicans, which are mainly white pelicans on display, and there are also pink-backed pelicans at the zoo in Guangzhou. For example, the following picture is a pelican herd photographed on the waterfowl lake of Tianjin Zoo, and I personally feel that the pelicans raised in the lake will make you appreciate the charm of this giant waterfowl more than the cage.
Speaking of the huge size of the characteristics, it is necessary to introduce how big the pelicans are. Adult pelicans are 1.5-1.7 meters long and weigh more than 12 kilograms, making them a big bird species. Weighing nearly 30 pounds, this does not affect the pelican's flight, powerful wings, wingspan of nearly 3 meters, can easily send the huge pelican to a height of thousands of meters.
Pelicans in the sky use hot air currents to soar freely like eagles and vultures. Pelicans fly at an average speed of 40km/h, and during the migratory season, they can last up to 24 hours. After arriving at the habitat, the pelican will step on the water surface or the ground with its webbing, flap its wings while stepping on it, lift off to a height of 50-100 meters to observe the water surface, and once it finds fish in shallow water areas, it will swoop down at a high speed of more than 70km/h, almost vertically plunging into the water, and using its own large mouth to instantly pocket food.
The word "in the pocket" is all too appropriate to describe the pelican's predation: because its mouth is actually a skin bag.
What interests us most about the pelican is always its large mouth, which can be swallowed by everything. The upper part of the pelican's beak is no different from that of other birds, and the amazing thing is the lower end of their beak: a sac-like structure made up of skin structures, which is called the "laryngeal sac". Scientists believe that the pelican's throat sac evolved from the laryngeal skin in order to adapt to predation in the water.
The pelican's throat sac has 3 times the volume of the stomach, which is very important for pelicans:
On the one hand, the pelican's throat sac is like a good performance fishing net, when there are fish in the water, the pelican uses this large mouth to gather small fish and water together in its mouth like a net, and then compress the throat sac to exclude excess water and swallow food. The throat sac of a pelican can hold up to 14 kg of fish! This throat sac holds fish that weigh more than pelicans. But under normal circumstances, the throat sac of a pelican bears 10% of the weight of food per day, which is enough for the pelican to eat and drink.
On the other hand, the pelican's throat sac is important for feeding offspring. When pelicans feed chicks, they return the food digested in their stomachs to the throat sac, which is like a "big bowl" for the little pelicans, and they can enjoy the food brought by their mother.
In fact, for fishing waterfowl, there are many birds that have a structure similar to the throat sac, but none of them can be compared with the lary sac of the pelican. Pelicans flexibly control the expansion and contraction of the laryngeal sac through the muscles of the tongue, in order to remain flexible, you often see pelicans with their mouths open and looking up at the sky to do "yoga", on the one hand, to maintain the elasticity of the throat sac, on the other hand, to help themselves dissipate heat.
Do you think the pelican's mouth is just big? Wrong, the pelican's large mouth is only a superficial impression of it: the real pelican, which is actually a very unworthy existence. Next, let's see which animals the pelican has made with its big mouth miserable.
Australia is a waterfowl-rich region, and because of the large number of individuals, the credibility of the study of bird behavior in Australia is very high. In the Australian town of Kingscote, the Pelican can be said to be a bully bird of the same level as the seagull. Pelicans have been found to eat with their mouths, sometimes not out of natural targeted predation: they simply want to put everything in their mouths out of curiosity.
Not just fish, anything that is seen by a pelican, it has to try to see if it can put it in its mouth. For example, I want to taste this dog's head.
Want to taste your cat:
Pelicans that are free-range at the zoo sometimes want to taste the giraffes.
Or passers-by in the town eating on the street, not only to keep an eye on the seagulls in the sky may come back at any time to rob, or even to notice that there is a pelican behind you that may want to swallow you at any time.
The pelican tries to swallow everything it can eat, including mice, other birds, and other small mammals. Even if some food is not in the pelican's biological chain, as long as it is found, it is difficult to swallow. If it is a large cat, cat and dog, fortunately, the pelican can not put down a mouth, and give up.
However, for some small animals, once they are caught in their big mouths by pelicans, they are basically doomed. In the pelican's eyes: Whatever it is, I can swallow it and say it again!
Whether it's a foul mouth, a predation, or a fight, the pelican's mouth is an important weapon for them. It is because this big mouth is sometimes too indebted, so it is inevitable that there will be injuries.
The laryngeal sac part of the pelican is very fragile skin tissue, and their laryngeal sac is often injured because of the lack of mouth. For example, the pelican in the picture below does not know what not to eat, resulting in a broken throat sac.
After all, the pelican throat sac is skin tissue, this damage can be healed, more tragic than the damage to the laryngeal sac, is the pelican beak fracture caused by the fight. Once the pelican's beak is injured, it is an irreversible injury. In May 2015, Dalian Forest Safari Park used 3D printing technology to create an artificial beak for a pelican with a broken upper beak.
Finally, under the power of technology, the pelican, which was injured in the fight, returned to the natural environment, and this bird's beak was made of nylon pa, which has the characteristics of anti-corrosion and rust-proof and durable, and since then the pelican has said: "Mom no longer has to worry about me fighting!" ”。
Although the pelican's mouth is easy to use, it is still too big, and it will inevitably bring trouble to itself in daily life. A pelican with a body length of 1.5 meters has a beak of 0.5 meters long, so they can't run fast, and even they can't walk.
After listening to so many pelican introductions, can you find the pelican icon in the following picture?
The pelican's food source is fish, but because as the marine environment and terrestrial waters deteriorate, the living space of wild pelicans has become smaller and smaller. Pelicans have accompanied thousands of people in the world, and it is recorded in China's "Chronicle of the Three Kingdoms, Wei Zhi, Emperor Wen": "In the summer of May, there are pelican birds gathered in the Lingzhi Pond. ”
At present, China has listed all three kinds of pelicans in the territory as national second-level protected animals, and the protection of pelicans seems to have no connection with ordinary people, but often ordinary people will cause evil consequences with some inconspicuous small things.
In order to prevent harm to pelicans, we also call on everyone to stop throwing garbage into the water when playing near the water, and take their garbage away in time to leave a harmonious living environment for wild animals.